I’ve started development on my first experiment, which is to try to make a series of meaningless games that result in a positive impact. So far, it has been incredibly difficult to muster up the will-power in order to keep a game meaningless at all, let alone to make it positive somehow. This will be an exercise in discipline of keeping a small scope and using subtractive design, if nothing else.
As you can see, it’s quite tempting as a designer to add complexity to the image above. And yet, this must be the first game. But I’ve decided most of the games will have more than just this, which will make them “mostly meaningless” I guess. On top of all this, they should be positive. I haven’t come up with too many ideas on how to do that yet, so I’m hoping that something will just come to me in the middle of development, hehe.
One of the things I realized I could learn from this whole experiment is how to intensify and purify meaning by separating elements of the game through elimination. If I define what isn’t in the gameplay, maybe that will help me realize what is. A nice side effect is a possible better skill in improving the non-game-specific elements of a game. Let me illustrate:
This first illustration would represent elements of a game and potential meanings the player could get from the game. If you remove some elements and reevaluate the game, you would notice certain meanings that are missing. Then you can group those elements and meanings together, which would result in a better definition of what game element creates what meaning.
If I continue this process scientifically, I could get a pretty defined set of elements and their corresponding meanings. The opposite would also be true: if I only started with one element – say a title – that could lead to a specific corresponding meaning. Then I could add elements little by little, evaluating the new meaning created. By keeping the elements few, I can focus on creating specific meaning using the least elements possible. This would result in an efficient game design, which I hope to talk about in a later post.
Will it work? It seems to be going all right so far. I’m working on a game with a few more elements, and I’ve already thought of an interesting by-product. Removing some elements can have a meaning in and of itself, and I hope to explore that with this game about rewards.
